While there's no shortage of fitness trackers on the market, the Garmin Vivosmart 3 ($139.99) manages to entice with a good blend of functionality and affordability. It's a bit disappointing when it comes to design—no interchangeable bands means what you see is what you get. But it makes up for that with accurate step counts, continuous heart rate monitoring, lots of collected data, and better-than-average notifications. It's worth consideration for casual gym-goers and data crunchers. Fashion-focused users are better off with the Fitbit Alta HR.

Practicality Over Style

In terms of design, the Vivosmart 3 is your basic silicone bracelet with a watch enclosure. Discreet but mostly just nondescript, it's sort of like the tomboy cousin of the Alta HR, minus the ability to swap bands, which is disappointing. While it's available in black or dark purple—both wardrobe-friendly colors—you can't dress it up or down the same way you can with the Alta HR.

The Vivosmart 3 comes in two sizes: small/medium and large. The small/medium fits wrists 4.8 to 7.4 inches in circumference, while the large fits 5.8 to 8.4 inches. It's 0.7-inch wide and 0.4-inch thick no matter the size, which is a hair wider than the default strap on the Alta HR.

While it may not be the most chic tracker out there, the Vivosmart 3 is comfortable enough to wear 24/7. The band breathes easily, so you don't have to worry about it getting grody after a workout. And since it's waterproof up to 5ATM (164 feet), it's also perfectly safe for use in the pool—plus it tracks your swims. While I didn't get into the pool, I wore the Vivosmart in the shower and had no problems.

The main issue with the Vivosmart 3's design is its screen. The 0.38-by-0.76-inch (HW) OLED touch display is embedded in the band and has a resolution of 64 by 128 pixels. While that should be clear enough to read without issue, the matte finish on the silicone band makes it appear blurry or clouded, as you can see below. Plus, it's practically unreadable under direct sunlight. If you flip it over, you'll find an optical heart rate sensor, which I'll discuss more in a bit.

Battery life is solid. I wore the Vivosmart 3 for about three weeks with push notifications enabled and about two syncs per day. I got an average of four to five days on a single charge. It's much better than the two days—if you're lucky—that you might get from smartwatches like the Apple Watch Nike+, but it pales in comparison with the Alta HR, which can last as long as 10 days.

Get Used to Swiping

To wake the tracker, you can either raise your wrist or double tap the display. If you press down, you can record workouts, change settings, test VO2 Max, set alarms or timers, sync, or find your phone. To scroll through different screens, swipe either left/right or up/down, depending on whether you've opted for a horizontal or vertical orientation. (I prefer horizontal, as I found it easier to read while typing or in mid-stride.)

From left: Garmin Vivosmart 3 and Fitbit Alta HR

To go deeper into a screen, you simply tap once. From there, you can swipe to access different options within that screen. For example, if you tap on the Steps screen you can access your step count history. Swiping then lets you scroll through your daily step count over the past few days.

If this sounds like a lot to remember, that's because it is. And it's compounded by the fact that the Vivosmart 3 frequently registers swipes as taps, and vice versa. I also found that regardless of which method I used, it didn't wake about a quarter of the time. This is a real shame, given the Vivosmart is capable of a lot more than your average fitness tracker. In addition to calendar, call, and text alerts, you can get app notifications, check the weather, control your music, and even find your phone. If you have the patience to swipe around, that is.

Accuracy and Fitness Features

Besides the optical heart rate monitor, the Vivosmart 3 has an accelerometer, ambient light sensor, and a barometric altimeter. And in addition to steps, it can track sleep, calories burned, floors climbed, distance traveled, and stress. The GarminConnect app is pretty comprehensive when it comes to displaying these metrics, and includes a helpful Insights tab that lets you see where you stand compared with other Garmin users.

It's also accurate. During a controlled one-mile walk at 3.5 miles per hour, the Vivosmart 3 logged 2,024 steps compared with the 2,096 steps on a Yamax SW-200 Digi-Walker pedometer. That's a difference of 3.4 percent, pretty average for a tracker. It performed better during a one-mile run at 5mph, logging 1,985 steps to the Yamax's 2,018, for a difference of 1.6 percent. This suggests the Vivosmart 3 is consistent across activities, which is good if you like to work out on a variety of machines.

The Vivosmart faltered a bit in tracking distance. It slightly underreported my walk at 0.93 mile, and overreported my run at 1.32 miles. Serious outdoor runners will be better served by trackers with built-in GPS, like the Polar M430 or the Garmin Forerunner 35.

The tracker did better when it came to heart rate monitoring. During an outdoor run, it was consistently within five beats per minute of the Polar H10 chest strap. (Chest straps are considered more accurate, as they monitor your heart rate via electrical signal.) I did sometimes experience a slight lag in reporting, but this is a mild annoyance and common among wrist-based trackers.

While I like that the Vivosmart 3 set my daily step goal based on recent activity, not all of the automatic fitness features are quite as seamless. Although it has automatic activity tracking, I was surprised at the paucity of data recorded. All you see is the activity, start time, and duration—forget trying to see your average heart rate, calories burned, pace, or splits. It also failed to record a 2.5-mile outdoor run and two treadmill runs. And activities recorded this way don't show up in the GarminConnect app's activities list, snapshots, or newsfeed.

The good news is you can manually record activities by pressing down, double tapping, and swiping to select the activity. When you do this you get all the metrics you expect, and then some, as you can see in the screenshot. (Though I find a max speed of 47mph questionable, the rest of my stats for this run were corroborated by other trackers.) Still, having to do this extra step is annoying when you consider Fitbits will auto-record any activity longer than 15 minutes, as well as the duration, calories burnt, average heart rate, active minutes, steps taken, and include three graphs while they're at it.

But the payoff here is greater context. It's easier to get a whole picture of each metric compared with Fitbit. For example, if you want to see how you've progressed in upping your daily step count, the Garmin Connect app presents your weekly, monthly, and yearly stats in an easily digestible screen. Fitbit only presents this data graphically—if you want hard numbers, you're going to have to scroll through weeks of data and get out a calculator. This extends to activities like cycling, running, and swimming. While you can get a decent amount of information from a single workout, Fitbit doesn't offer an easy way to measure your progress over time.

Plus, Fitbit only offers a scattershot look at how you stack up compared with others your age and gender. While you can check your cardio fitness level and sleep data, how you track across steps, distance walked, or activities is a mystery. You don't need this data, per se, but it's nice to have the option with Garmin.

Conclusions

If you're a data nerd or an athlete with a casual interest in stats, the Vivosmart 3 is a solid choice. For $140, you get comprehensive metrics, lots of notification options, and good battery life. The downsides are a cloudy display, a lack of interchangeable bands, and a clunky interface. The Fitbit Alta HR is just $10 more and gets you a lot for your money in terms of style and ease of use. Either offers a similar fitness-tracking experience for about the same price, so it really comes down to whether you value fashionable flexibility or deeper data. Also make sure to consider our Editors' Choice, the Fitbit Charge 2. It's a bit less discreet, but has a much sharper display and better controls, as well as the option to connect your phone for GPS.

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About the Author

Victoria Song is the wearables and smart home analyst at PCMag. Since graduating from Temple University?s Japan Campus in 2010, she's been found reporting and editing in every corner of the newsroom at The ACCJ Journal, The Japan News, and New York bureau of The Yomiuri Shimbun. In her spare time, she bankrupts herself going to theater, buying expa... See Full Bio

Garmin Vivosmart 3

Garmin Vivosmart 3

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